15 January 2017 12:50 AM

PETER HITCHENS: For once Donald Trump is right - these sordid claims stink (and you can take that from a man who knows a lot about seedy stings in Russian hotels)

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

Picture this: it is well past midnight in the deeply grim Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. In a squalid communist-era hotel, the bedside phone rings for the fifth time. My friend and colleague Rachel answers wearily.

She knows who is on the line. It is the same prostitute who has called her four times before, asking for Mr Hitchens.‘Look,’ Rachel explains in her perfect Russian. ‘I am not the person you want. He is alone and asleep in room 362. This is room 243. I am alone and awake in it. I do not want your services.’

‘Not possible,’ replies the prostitute in bored tones. ‘Mr Hitchens was allocated room 243. I was ordered to call room 243. So I am calling it.’ Room 243 must have been the one with the camera.

Such, in those days, was Soviet bureaucracy. It was unimaginable that we would defy the plan in this way. The tart was following her orders to the letter. By swapping rooms, Rachel and I had sabotaged weeks of scheming by the Sverdlovsk KGB.

This went on all night, while I slept undisturbed. So far as I know, it was the KGB’s only attempt to lure me into a honey-trap during my years as a correspondent in the USSR. They did send an attractive middle-aged woman to travel in a neighbouring sleeper on the Ostend- to-Moscow Express, as I made my way to set up home in the Soviet capital. But that wasn’t, I think, about sex. Romance failed to blossom, anyway. They hoped (correctly) that I would hire this brisk but shady lady as my assistant, a job she was very good at.

She disappeared as soon as the KGB worked out, through close observation of my private life, that I could not possibly be a spy. As a parting gift, they rather clumsily installed a microphone in my car, in case they were wrong.

At almost exactly the same moment, the now-famous spymaster Christopher Steele was arriving in Moscow, under diplomatic cover as a second secretary at the British Embassy, but actually working for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

I was an icy Cold Warrior, consumed with loathing of the Evil Empire and all in favour of British nuclear weapons, whereas Mr Steele had recently left Cambridge, where he is said to have been ‘an avowedly Left-wing student with CND credentials’, and a ‘confirmed socialist’. Isn’t MI6 an odd organisation?

But in any case, I think I can claim to have some knowledge of the strange world of bugged rooms, naughty ladies and blackmail of which we have heard so much this week. I’ve also kept in touch with Moscow and Russia, places utterly transformed since the 1990s, whereas, it is said, Mr Steele hasn’t been back for 20 years. AND I must say I am deeply unimpressed with the document in which extraordinary, sordid claims are made against Donald Trump. Nameless sources, said without evidence to be reliable (‘a trusted compatriot’), repeatedly make vague, untestable claims. It is padded with general political statements to make it look grander than it is.The most convincing bits in it are the blacked-out sections. These at least cannot be shown to be wrong – unlike the claim that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, met Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016. Mr Cohen says he has never even been to Prague.

I loathe and mistrust Donald Trump. I think he is an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life. I fear what he may do. But that does not mean I lose all sense of proportion.

Like it or not, he has been duly and lawfully elected as the head of state and government of the USA. If we believe in either democracy or law, or both at once, we must respect this fact. We cannot approve of, or help, attempts to topple him by scandal and smear, before he has even sworn the oath of office.We should also stop being so pious. Far better men than Mr Trump, such as Jimmy Carter, have been disasters in office. John F. Kennedy, now revered as a sort of saint, had a private life which in this age would have brought him down in weeks.

And maybe the Russians did try to influence the American elections. I think it likely but unproven. But President Obama openly sought to influence our EU referendum, and it is now proven that the CIA tried to get us to join the Common Market at the start in the 1950s.

Around the same time, the CIA was (quite rightly in my view) spending a fortune defeating the communists in Italian elections. And we and the USA engineered and paid for a violent putsch against the elected government in Iran, for which we are still bitterly resented there.

Once you slip beyond the curtain of public relations into the real, cold world, as I have been lucky enough to do, life turns out to be a good deal more incredible than you thought it was. But there are still some things that it’s wiser not to believe.

Great film, Rachel... shame about the slip up

Here comes that rare thing – an intelligent and entertaining film. It’s called Denial and it is about the London libel trial that destroyed the reputation of the ghastly David Irving, who claims that Hitler did not industrially mass-murder Europe’s Jews. The best thing about it is that the decisive courtroom scenes are word-for-word true.

Tom Wilkinson, one of the great actors of our age, beautifully portrays the cool, restrained disgust with which Richard Rampton QC cross-examined Irving. He destroyed him not with histrionics, but on the facts. Irving was shown beyond doubt to be a hateful bigot who purposely told untruths.

Of course, it’s a film, so there are embellishments. Irving (who is quite good-looking) is played by Timothy Spall, doing his impression of a disgruntled codfish (or me, if you prefer). Deborah Lipstadt, who fought the case and looks, well, like an American professor, is portrayed by the glamorous Rachel Weisz. And I’m not sure the makers fully understand how English law works.

But one thing cheeses me off. At the end of the trial, Prof Lipstadt is shown listing a number of things which everyone knows to be true. The Holocaust happened. The Earth is round. Elvis is dead. Slavery happened. Yup, so far, so good. Then we get: ‘The ice caps are melting.’

Sorry, but this is a category error. Apart from the curious fact that sea ice has actually been expanding at the South Pole in recent years, the man-made global warming thing remains a belief and an opinion.

It may be true. It may not be. Those who dispute it are not evil or bigots. To compare their doubts to Irving’s lies is plain wrong, especially in a film about a trial that hinged on absolute truth.

Making an effort to be offended

Although he didn’t see or hear her deliver it, Oxford professor Joshua Silver got hold of a draft of Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s Tory conference speech, presumably so that he could be properly offended by it. She had made a typically empty Tory pledge to make it harder for British companies to employ migrants and to ensure foreign workers ‘were not taking jobs British workers could do’. Nothing, of course, actually happened.

But Prof Silver, right, complained to the police, who have recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Laugh or fume as much as you like, this is now the law of England. And it will get worse. A few years hence, anyone who says any such thing will face arrest and prosecution. Wait and see.

**** If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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Why is "hate crime" legislation needed?
There were plenty of existing laws that could be used without this Orwellian concept being adopted.

Posted by: Jack | 16 January 2017 at 01:00 AM

The trouble with the existing laws was that they applied only to crimes which had actually occurred. The purpose of the "hate crime" legislation is for the authorities to be able to prosecute – and send to jail – conservatives for entirely imaginary crimes, which is the real purpose of these surreally mendacious Acts of Parliament.

'Steven Armstrong - I presume you also believe the moon is made of green cheese. So could you please tell me how you can prove it?'

As far as I am aware, I haven't made any statements on this latest column about what I do and do not believe. It is Mr Hitchens who has made certain claims, and I have asked him to 'GO ON THEN' as respects demonstrating some of the things he claims as demonstrable. Our host has now fallen silent - as expected.

He will rely on science for some things - almost without question - and then challenge science on other things. And, as a whole, we are all supposed to believe the garbage science tells us, much of it science fiction and not proven fact, and treated as fools when we ask for real evidence.

Yet on the existence of God people demand seemingly incontrovertible proof, despite the fact they take the word of a few idiot scientists when they put forward ridiculous theories - evolution, gravity, multi-verse, big bang, etc.

It is regrettable, and disgraceful, that several countries have made it a criminal offence to discuss the matter of the Nazis' extermination of Jews during World War II. In the long run, this will play into the hands of those who hate, and want to destroy, the state of Israel.
Some major problems are these:
1. Although it now seems very probable that the Nazis murdered over 1.5 million people in "pop-up" extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (all in occupied Poland), they made considerable efforts to hide what they had done. When Soviet troops first arrived in these areas it was not apparent what had happened there.
Whether from genuine ignorance, or because it was cheaper, Stalin decided to make Auschwitz - which had been captured intact - the showpiece of Nazi atrocities.
2. Our understanding of what happened at Auschwitz was shaped by what Stalin said and the evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Nothing Stalin said should be taken at face value (not least because he was blaming the Germans for the Katyn Wood massacre of Poles which he had ordered). The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice.
One of the Nazi defendants, Himmler's deputy Kaltenbrunner, called the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, as his defence witness to say that he (Kaltenbrunner) had not personally ordered killings. The transcript shows that Hoess was blatantly led by counsel. It now seems probable that Hoess had been tortured by his British captors and told what to say. It also seems likely that Hoess took a perverse delight in boasting about, and exaggerating, the number of killings he had achieved at Auschwitz. Based on Hoess's testimony, the Nuremberg court estimated that about 5 million people had died at Auschwitz. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the Polish government reduced that estimate to 1.1 million - which might be consistent with casualties of slave labour.
It seems that the "gas chambers" which are shown to visitors to Auschwitz were built after the war - for illustrative purposes - and the large chimney is not even connected to the crematoria. It seems likely that the "gas chambers" on display were created from an air raid shelter.
This may well illustrate the horrors committed elsewhere at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka - and other places - but visitors are led to believe more than this.
3. Western perceptions of the Nazi concentration camps are heavily influenced by film made by U.S and British troops who happened to liberate slave labour camps rather than those used for deliberate mass exterminations. These films showed inmates who were starving and/or thus susceptible to typhus.
What the films omitted to emphasise was that the inmates were starving because the Allies were ruthlessly bombing German lorries which attempted to deliver food to them. This was a logical corollary of the policy of "unconditional surrender", and the fact that the inmates were being used to aid the German war effort, but it seems that outrage against the Nazis was used to deflect any misgivings about the Allied bombing policy.
4. At a human level, we have the unsettling case of Anne Frank and her father. Her father was sent to the hospital at Auschwitz because he was ill. He was treated and survived the war. Anne Frank was transferred from Auschwitz to Belsen. She died at Belsen, from malnutrition and typhus, because British and American planes were bombing the lorries which carried her food supplies.
This does not sit easily with the general perceptions of the matter.

My thanks to Mr Hitchens for his interest. I think there is an intrinsic difference between the "fundamental nature" of international communist ideology on the one hand, and the "fundamentnal nature" of Nazism (world domination by an "Arian race") on the other. Perhaps Mr HItchens disagrees?

Evil cannot of course be "measured" (and anyway, I used the term as an adjective, not as a noun.) Evil is a subjective term, and it is my personal view that Hitler's ideological motivation was more evil than Stalin's - but perhaps Mr Hitchens disagrees? And the more evil the motivation, the more evil the crime - but again, perhaps Mr Hitchens disagrees?

Please note that I am speaking of "ideological motivation". I doubt whether Stalin's "personal" motivations were any less evil than Hitler's.

"I loathe and mistrust Donald Trump. I think he is an oaf and a yahoo who has gravely damaged the standards of public life."

You keep on referring to Trump as an oaf and a yahoo, but have never expanded on why you consider him to be one. I don't think you ever mentioned to having had personally met him, so why the loathing? I hope you can expand on the reasons for your animosity towards Trump in a future article, because at the moment is seems very unreasonable (and unjustified) on your part. You say that you fear what he may do, but do not elaborate.

There is 'evidence' from NASA that suggests that Mars and some other planets in our solar system are getting warmer, our sun is throwing out far more solar energy than would be normally expected, further it appears that our planet is also getting warmer from within it's core.
The witch hunt by the warmists against open minded people is way to premature, but of course like so many of these louder than life people it is about promoting a political ideology more than anything else.

Roy Robinson and Dimitri Cavalli - I think you both miss the point. Stalin's and Hitler's crimes may have been similar, some perhaps identical. But their (ideological) motivation was different. That is what makes Hitler's crimes in essence more evil than Stalin's.

***PH writes. That's interesting. Can he explain precisely how this works, and how one measures evil?

The motivation for the latest allegations against Trump is absurdly transparent: accuse him of being blackmailed by the Ruskies in order to box in his ability to seek rapprochement with Putin - the logic being that DJT will now overcompensate in his attitude towards Russia in order to avoid giving weight to the charge of being under their control. It's a very basic technique, and clearly not the work of especially subtle brains. But luckily for the modern Neocon spooks, they don't have to be intellectually or imaginatively gifted since the media are more than happy to lap up their pornographic narratives without the slightest serious attempt at analysis.

And of course the spooks can also count on corporate journos failing to ask any hard questions about exactly what the purpose of all the western intelligence agency snooping on their own politicians is. Could it be that in accusing the Russians of using surveillance material to control pols, they are simply attributing their own own methods to other states? That's a rhetorical question by the way - I already know the answer.

P Hitchens 'loathes' Trump.
Don't hide your light under bushel please!
Trump isn't president yet however so far he has saved car workers jobs, he has waged war on 'big pharma', and he has set up a committee headed by Robert Kennedy to look into inoculations given to children which many think leads to a kind of autism.
P Hitchens can be infantile about him, but I am more concerned with what he actually does, I would say so far so good.
Why, surely even the left should be flocking to him now he is waging war on big capital!

Graham anon’s Parthian shot “did someone lean on Mr Hitchen's to write this piece of nonsense?” is straight out of David Irving’s list of conspiracy theories.

David Irving had got back in the ring foolishly hoping to revive his title claim, but the lawyers delivered a knockout blow. It was not that the lawyers knew more about WWII than Irving. Rather, they focused on areas where text-based historians often slip (and certainly the one track mind of Irving does): on-site investigation and laboratory testing. Lawyers are very familiar with this material. They forced him into their corner and knocked him flat. Good riddance.

No, I didn't think your initial comment was likely to change public opinion, it simply seemed to suggest that 'bad behaviour' was a valid form of entertainment. Perhaps it is on YouTube , a place I've never visited. Is it funded by advertising or made available to the public by the sheer generosity of its owners?

"Sorry, but this is a category error. Apart from the curious fact that sea ice has actually been expanding at the South Pole in recent years, the man-made global warming thing remains a belief and an opinion."
This is a situation where someone seizes on to one circumstance, and clings for dear life. There are explanations, where basically the increase in sea ice is as a result of less of it on the Antarctic continent itself.

Do you have a genuine interest in the subject? Do you look at the many many examples of glaciers retreating further and further back up mountains around the world?
Do you seize on the example that suits you, and disregard the many others that don't? If 90% of examples point to one thing and 10% don't then on what basis do you choose the 10%?

***OPH writes: No, none of these. I think there is global warming. I don't think we know why it is happening, and don't think we have very adequate knowledge of its extent (measuring temperature is itself a rather complex activity) .The point about Antarctic sea ice is quite simple. It's that it is technically untrue to say 'the icecaps (plural) *are* melting', except in the sense that they do every year during the local summer. . One icecap is, some of the time. the other is expanding. As i said, global warming is hard to measure or quantify. I try not to speak or write as if I know more than I do. May I recommend all who engage in this discussion to follow the same rule, and to be patient with opponents? Angry heresy hunts are the almost invariable sign of a weak case. *****

You criticise PH for denouncing Trump and insist that he should look to our own politicians' foibles, starting "with Cameron and Blair".

Absolutely right, sir. PH's fawning, obsequious, oleaginous attitude towards "the Blair Creature" and "Mister Slippery" must surely have diminished him in the eyes of all those who think that journalists have a responsibility to speak truth to power and to hold our national leaders to account.

You would be well advised to do a bit of research (you only have to consult the index to this blog) before you fire off any more ill-informed, thoughtless and downright ignorant nonsense again.

We can only make a deal with Donald Trump AFTER we have left the EU. Trump does not like NATO as the US has to pay for most of its budget. He wants to see the EU become a federation responsible for its own defence but that is not possible as long as the UK keeps its opt outs. He wants good relations with Russia which may mean NATO having to let buffer states like Estonia and even Finland bordering on Russia, come under some kind of Russian influence once more.The main challenge to American hegemony in the Pacific is China and the mad state of north Korea coming up behind. It looks as if we are going to have a repeat of Yalta with China replacing Japan as America's main enemy in order to save America from becoming an economic colony of China. Trump wants to make America great again. with a bankrupt Britain hanging on his every word.

I think that, contrary to what you say, both our host and his late brother were in perfect agreement on David Irving's right to express his opinions freely, however much they might have loathed them.

It is only through free expression that such opinions can be exposed to scrutiny and, when necessary, demolished. Banning such free expression makes those imposing the ban appear afraid of discussion and gives the impression of having something to hide.

***PH writes: This is broadly correct, (though I defend freedoms rather than 'rights' which, as far as I know, do not exist). I think my late brother was originally quite complimentary about Irving's historical work. This was not an uncommon position('Dreadful man, good historian', being a fair summary of what many would say about him then) I am not sure if he later publicly changed his view. ***

Would it be too much to hope that the seemingly non-stop speculation of war with Vladimir Putin's Russia by 'the West' will soon start to rapidly dissipate? President-elect Trump is coming under fire in much of the media for allegedly wanting to 'make friends' with Putin.

Are lawyers cleverer than historians? I had a historian friend in Oxford who gave it up and worked for a lawyer in London. He claimed lawyers had much sharper minds than any he had seen at the university, and used English much more precisely.

On a related point, when the Rachel Weisz character repeats the line that 'all historians who deny the holocaust have a hidden agenda', I am inclined to generalize and say ‘all historians have an agenda’, and they do well if they don’t hide it. Some methods promise greater objectivity, like the use of parallel sources including archaeological digs and laboratory tests. This is territory with which lawyers are very familiar, and is where they sought and found David Irving’s clearest weaknesses.

Once again David Hare makes a fine drama out of close observation of life. When he was writing Racing Demon he sat in the gallery at numerous C of E meetings. No doubt this is his method when he writes about the courts as well.

@Benedict Smyth:
"The case of David Irving is possibly the one topic on which you're brother was right and you are not! The possibility of reasoned scepticism about even the most received of received opinions seems fundamental to the cause of free thought."

But the film is about David Irving bringing a libel case against Miss Lipstadt- he was trying to infringe upon her freedom of thought. Peter's brother defended Irving when he was arrested (which he was right to do) but the film is about something entirely different.

This may well have been the case, Mr or Ms 17, but your certainty seems unfounded, at any rate as far as Mr Hitchens's Russian tale is concerned. Nothing in it implies that he knew anything about the spying seductress until after the event. In fact he states that he "slept undisturbed" while the temptress attempted to tempt. Not a very scintillating signal, as beacons go.

Why is "hate crime" legislation needed?
There were plenty of existing laws that could be used without this Orwellian concept being adopted.
What was wrong with prosecuting people for inciting violence, or behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace?
The sooner the abortions produced by Mr. Blair's governments are done away with the better.

I remember, back in 1976, seeing Mr. Irving taking questions from a hostile audience. At the time he was saying that there was no documentary evidence of Hitler knowing about the murder of the Jews. That, of course, doesn't mean he didn't know. However, Mr. Irving made an interesting point. He told his audience that they ought to be more concerned about his interpretation of history than the received version. This was because the received version blamed a madman who was now dead (problem over), whereas in his version the blame lay with many bureaucrats, who were able to do what they did, because a large section of society shared their prejudices. At the time, 40 years ago, many of those people were still alive, and a good number were in senior positions in government and industry.

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